As an unprecedented success overtaking Titanic at the Japanese box office and becoming the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, winning worldwide acclaim and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Spirited Away has since solidified its stature as the preeminent Japanese animated film—an amalgam of dreamlike Japanese myth that has surpassed what is Japanese, exhibiting a timeless universality. The story is that of a girl, Chihiro, who follows her parents into what seems to be a derelict amusement park that they have discovered, having strayed from the highway into the dense thickets of an eerie woodland. After spotting a buffet stall, her parents begin eating, and Chihiro, wandering on her own through the fairgrounds, meets a mercurial boy by the name of Haku, who advises her to cross the riverbed by sunset; but she returns to discover that her parents have become pigs, having eaten like pigs, and a mystical world of nocturnal spirits, bizarre life forms and costumed ghouls, seals her off from the human daylight world.
The sudden transition into the mystical world, whose mecca is a bathhouse headed by a frightening, hydrocephalic witch by the name of Yubaba, characterizes a film that is always changeful and threatening; its threats and shifting allegiances, its sudden transitions, reflect the psychology of Chihiro and distinguish the film from its American counterparts, which are never so baleful and malevolent. The ambiguity of allegiance should terrify the children that are the intended audience of the film, but the frolicsome lightness of the adventure and the cheekiness of the characters offset the darker emotions of the story. It is a pell-mell gamut of invention, and Peter Bradshaw writes correctly that no other film “is so readily able to astonish and wears that ability so lightly and insouciantly.”[1] What is baleful and ambiguous has never been so intoxicating.
The distinction of this mercurial film is part of its being Japanese, a national culture that welcomes what is mystical in such creatures as the susuwatari—those bouncing black sprites that pilfer Chihiro’s shoes as the underlings of Kamaji, the boiler man—and the shikigami, embodied in the story as cutout manikins pursuing the dragon likeness of Haku. The magical and mystical in Spirited Away, its uniqueness as a film, is thus inseparable from what is Japanese; Elvis Mitchell affirms this inseparability when he writes that “no one else conjures the phantasmagoric and shifting morality of dreams — that fascinating and frightening aspect of having something that seems to represent good become evil — in the way this master Japanese animator does,” referring to the director of the film, Hayao Miyazaki.[2]
But what is universal in Spirited Away subsumes what is Japanese, so that its national uniqueness as a film, as an artwork, touches on the universal human wellspring giving the story its power. Deriving in part from the Japanese mythos of its characters and themes, the story achieves universality because it is never anything but itself; it is uncompromising, in keeping with those films that are “spellbinding because they make no attempt to cater to us; they are defiantly, triumphantly, themselves.”[3] And Spirited Away is only itself.
The effect of the film is a liberating childlikeness: Entering into the mysteries of human existence and reclaiming her identity, Chihiro moves through the strange world that is our world, posing challenges and presenting an outré and unsettling newness recognizable as that junction of adolescence and adulthood, childhood and adolescence, heralding the developments to come. The beautiful fantasy of Spirited Away, new, strange, exciting, is older than any of us can remember.
- Peter Bradshaw. “Spirited Away—review,” theguardian.com, 11 September 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/sep/12/spirited-away-review ↑
- Elvis Mitchell. “Conjuring Up Atmosphere Only Anime Can Deliver,” nytimes.com, 20 September 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/movies/film-review-conjuring-up-atmosphere-only-anime-can-deliver.html ↑
- Roger Ebert. “Spirited Away,” rogerebert.com, 11 July 2012, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away-2002 ↑
